Sylviane---Week 4 Post: Emotional Expression

Sylviane Boddy

The Gladwell reading concerning reading faces brought up a number of points that I found particularly interesting. In its account of John Yarbrough’s encounter with the criminal, Yarbrough is described as having a “hunch” that the kid with the gun was not a threat, and that this understanding was something that “ninety-nine out people out of hundred wouldn’t have seen.” It proceeds to detail a study in which participants are shown videos of people telling the truth or lying, and that Yarbrough performed far better than the average fifty percent correct score. This made me wonder what would cause any one individual to be so skilled at a task of reading faces, considering that is something we all encounter every day. (Granted, Yarbrough was a police office and likely had a bit more experience in immediately threatening situations, like the one described.) Further, because it has been shown in a variety of studies that emotional expressions are essentially universal across cultures, can it be suggested that reading faces is a genetically encoded skill? It is known that face processing activates specific areas of the brain, namely the fusiform gyrus, occipital gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus, but what specifically gives us the knowledge to complete such tasks; is it a skill we have learned throughout our lives or something we are born with? Finally, I wondered about the impact of other factors, such as body position and gestures, on reading a person’s emotion or state of mind in their face. Previous reading mentioned that little is known about the biological nature of reading this information, but their importance in reading emotion cannot be disregarded.

emotional conciousness

Kevin Goldstein

I’m intrigued by the sudden reversal found in this week’s readings, namely that LeDoux’s emphasis on the emotional unconscious has been superseded by emotional consciousness. The motif which traverses these readings, save LeDoux’s, concerns the integrated character of emotion; emotion is a state of mind both affective and conceptual: “brain structures at the heart of the neural circuitry for emotion (e.g., the anygdala) impact cognitive processing from early attention allocation…through perceptual processing to memory” (Barrett, 386). As the Barrett article argues, emotions emerge at the level of psychological description with underlying correlative neurobiological processes. There is thus an evolving, continuous stream of affect and conceptual processing underway.

Here we find a shift in focus framed around a shift in definition. If emotion is not merely defined by neurobiological response but conscious representation, then how we examine the experience of emotion necessarily changes. LeDeoux argues that as emotions are primarily unconscious, introspective accounts or self-reports prove specious as a mode of analysis. If, however, we define emotions as emergent on the conscious level, then indeed self-reportage becomes nor merely valuable but invaluable to analysis.

Core affect, defined as the universal, valence-orientated neurobiological responses to a given stimulus or stimuli, is entrenched in a kind of internal dialectic—though perhaps this creates an impure dichotomy—with psychological representation, or the conceptual framework, with in turn produces a meaningful synthesis, namely emotion, “the remembered past” (Barrett, 386). This conceptual framework, characterized by conditioned—either experiential or sociocultural—notions of what constitutes an emotion, functions in unison with these neurobiological responses. In short, on the conscious level, affective responses are always mediated in a social context.

Thus, on the conscious level, the sociocultural ramifications of affective response are indeed a key facet of emotional experience. From a scientific standpoint, however, self-reports run the danger of becoming merely anthropologically significant. Emotional expression becomes a question of representation, and thus semiotics overwhelms neurobiology. In this way perhaps we become enmeshed in surface structures.

In Freudian terms, neurobiological responses constitute a kind of id response which is, in turn, met with the superego conceptual framework; herein the ego mediates to produce the emotion. Is this excessively neat? Perhaps, especially when we insist on delimiting spheres of consciousness vis-à-vis emotion. Indeed, as the Barrett article claims, the affective and conceptual blur; the pure subject is not existent, but emotes along a social continuum. Neurobiological responses are interwoven with the conceptual framework just as the self is interwoven with the community. Better said, they are neither mutually exclusive nor undifferentiated. As the Barrett-Russell article asserts, through the representation of emotional states, language maps onto affective feelings.

Meanwhile, “The Naked Face” article contests mere introspection as a limit of emotional analysis. In short, self-definition with regard to emotion is potentially misleading, as LeDoux maintains; one is not always the best judge of one’s emotional state—though the Bechara-Naqvi article would have it that at the very least we can read certain visceral sensations with relative facility. By way of the so-called voluntary emotional system, we can manipulate our emotions as a means of manipulating others, but nonetheless, we are not always in control of our emotive signifiers, namely as concerns the involuntary emotional system’s microexpressions. In other words, there is at times a discrepancy between what is said and what is signaled. Thus our conceptual framework is faulty, or at the very least orientated more towards a certain internal homeostasis. At the same time, this article reveals that emotional meaning construction is not merely of an intrapersonal but interpersonal character. As social animals, perhaps interpersonal communication often takes precedent over self-knowledge.

Amina Sariahmed

2-11-08

It is difficult to argue that there is one unified system of processing emotion in the brain and Ledoux asserts that such a system is unlikely to exist (1996, 106). However, I am inclined to disagree. Examining different emotions separately may be a good place to begin exploring the mechanisms that control such phenomena but I do believe that once individual emotions (if we can even define a singular emotion) are thoroughly understood I would hypothesize that we would find much in common between them. But this approach can be problematic because it is difficult to isolate one emotion from another. Emotional experiences are not discrete and singular occurrences that exist independently from one another. If we consider the spectrum of emotions, many emotions are interconnected and overlapping, so it seems impossible that fear for example can occur by means of a process entirely separate from that which may bring about happiness or anger. How can scientists effectively monitor various emotions when there is a lack of consensus on how to define them?

Molly Moody

Molly Moody

I am overwhelmed with where to begin.

I thought the Barrett-Russell article was particularly useful in defining many of the terms we use to describe emotions. Words such as experience, affect, and pleasure, necessary terms for describing emotions, have dual expressions used in every-day vocabulary. Barrett is right; there really is no language in which to communicate this field of science. In this light, describing current affect as “a space formed by two bipolar, but independent dimensions” is a brilliantly worded counter to Darwin’s one-sided view of emotional evolution.

Upon first glance I felt a kinship with Darwin’s idea of emotions; animal adaptations slowly evolving from basic (fear, rage) to complex (panic, tense, relaxed, etc) emotions. Plutchik also set forth the innovative idea of blending Primary Dyads (a mix of adjacent basic emotions) to create Secondary and Tertiary Dyads. Both men captured the magnitude of emotions like Anger and Fear (Basic emotions for both) when compared to demi-emotions like Friendliness (Primary), Sullenness (Secondary), or Delight (Tertiary). Though this use of hierarchical emotions is beautifully debated in Structure of Current Affect (p.3), there is no argument that three principles correlate different emotions with different shades, similar to last week’s discussion of a color wheel of emotions. In light of the Barrett-Russell [color] wheel, however, Darwin and Plutchik both seem to have over-generalized “basic” emotions. Anger and Fear may seem like more forceful emotions, but intensity is not to be confused with greater brain function.

It is this idea of intense emotions, however, that got me wondering about the need for Secondary or Tertiary emotions to exist at all. Though Barrett briefly discusses the use of feelings as necessary to instinctual memory, it was not mentioned anywhere else in the text. The Emotional Brain’s discussion of Tooby and Cosmides view on evolutionary memory intrigued me, “emotions involve situations that have occurred over and over…cause us to appraise present events in terms of our ancestral past” (p126). Perhaps this view can be expanded to explain the necessity for such a large variety of emotions. What is the correlation between feelings and memory?

After reading LeDoux and Structure of Current Affect, I thought I had an interesting grasp of the material, but Listening to Your Heart just messed me up. From the article, I understand that the body will always react to a stimulus, and emotions only derive from an emotional stimulus, but what is an emotional stimulus? It is obviously more complex than “you see your love” or one of the other scenarios described by Bechara. Are our own personalities in control of what makes a stimulus an emotional stimulus, or are emotional stimuli products of a need to survive and instinctually recognize danger, or a chance to reproduce? In that case, what is personality? Does my personality, likes and dislikes, make the difference between my reactions to a bear slightly different from someone else’s? What if it were a broken vase instead of a bear?

I found one particularly interesting correlation between study methods of The Experience of Emotion and Ekman. Feldman-Barrett describe their observational methods as examining self-reports of emotions as an indicator of verbal behaviors rather than content of the conversation, “infer the content in mental states such as experiences of emotion is by treating self-reports as verbal behaviors and examining how people use

words to represent those experiences” (p.5). This really interesting idea is similar to Ekman’s study of faces; it is the same idea that listening to the words a person uses does not get results, but rather looking for patterns within the open atmosphere allowed. How many times a day does one get the opportunity to truly speak about the way he or she is feeling uninterrupted? Even if the words expressed are meaningless and come from an obvious first person point of view, facial expressions and key words vocalized shed more light on one’s emotions than an entire monologue of words. Obviously emotions are such a dominant part of our personalities that they underscore everything rational.

Week Four Readings

Katie Moeller

I found that this week’s readings provided me with a number of “aha!” moments, which I must say was refreshing as compared with the slew of questions that previous week’s readings have left me with. Not that I am now out of questions – those are still plentiful – but I find that the more we read, the clearer I become on what exactly is involved in tackling a question as large as “what is an emotion?” In particular I felt that this week’s material helped elucidate some important distinctions, namely between the experience of emotion and the expression of emotion, and between emotion and feeling.

Thus far I have been able to follow and accept many of LeDoux’s central ideas about emotion - that the theory of the limbic system is flawed, that there may be many emotional systems in the brain rather than one, that evolution is essential in how we examine the emotional brain - and I do appreciate his thorough explication of the various theories of emotion and how these interconnect and build off one another even as research continues to move forward. However, I have experienced his argument at times as misdirected, almost as if he wasn’t giving the reader all the information they needed in order to understand why he is so forcefully pushing particular points. I’ve been chalking this up to my general lack of knowledge about both the structures and theories of the brain, but this week I think I figured out that much of what LeDoux has been focused on has been necessary to lead into a specific discussion of the fear response which he explains in Chapter Five is what he really wants to use in order to attack the question of emotion as a whole.

Once he finally begins to discuss fear (around p. 128), LeDoux’s argument seems to gel, and it became clear to me that there is a reason he has been setting us up in this particular way with this particular information all this time. LeDoux asserts that fear is an excellent entry point for examining emotion because it is a profound part of our experience of the world, is linked to mental health, and appears in similar ways in both human and non-human animals. These justifications seem valid, and it was helpful to have them so delineated, but I was left feeling that placing the focus exclusively on fear has the potential to limit a greater discussion of the universal processes involved in emotion, mostly because fear seems to me to be so qualitatively different from many (most?) of the other kinds of emotions that can occur. Because fear has such direct evolutionary roots, I wonder how well we’ll be able to use knowledge of its underlying processes to inform our understanding of less obviously evolutionarily significant emotions, such as joy or embarrassment. I also wonder whether LeDoux will allow for the various ways that fear can manifest or be described by people, for example as anxiety, worry, or prejudice, or if he will instead stick to a more traditional view of fear as a response to a dangerous or threatening situation.

LeDoux makes clear that when he is attacking the topic of emotion, he is not primarily concerned with the feeling a person has when a particular emotion is activated. He makes this clear in his first chapter, and goes on in Chapter Five to elaborate on this, stating that feelings can only occur when an emotional response occurs in a conscious individual. The issue of feeling is not crucial for LeDoux because he is intent on the survival element of emotion, which does not depend on consciousness, as demonstrated by the similarity in fear responses across various species. While I find the ability to make these connections and to see such seemingly different animals respond to stimuli in such similar ways fascinating, I can’t help but be compelled by the human feelings that accompany the responses. Unlike LeDoux, I have a harder time writing them off because they seem to be such a fascinating aspect of the whole mystery of emotions.

For this reason, I very much appreciated “The Experience of Emotion” by Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross. In general this piece helped explain why the element of experience has for some time been all but removed from the study of emotion, and also why at this point it is both crucial and scientific to find a way to put it back in. Drawing on Searles’ biological naturalism, these authors argue that the experience of emotions can be best understood scientifically by the equal consideration of both a thorough description of the experience and the brain functions responsible for generating such descriptions. Unlike LeDoux, Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross see consciousness as essential piece of how emotions are mentally represented, and they outline Edelman’s idea of the “remembered present,” in which the brain works to constantly integrate information from the environment, the body, and from memory into a unified, conscious perception of each moment. The authors’ summary that “ an experience of an emotion is a state of mind whose content is at once affective (pleasant or unpleasant) and conceptual (a representation of the world around you,” (p. 386) made perhaps the most sense to me thus far of anything we’ve read in terms of the way that our past experiences combine with current stimuli and bodily responses to inform how we actually feel as we are moving around the world.

Of special interest to me is the way this particular view helps explain how the “knowledge about emotion,” (p. 386) which an individual brings to an experience of emotion affects how that person will characterize their feelings. This seems to have implications both for individuals over the course of time (conceptions of feelings may well change as experiences compound), as well as for the marked differences that can be found in the way that two people with different life experiences will characterize their feelings completely differently even when the circumstances of a triggering situation are the same or similar. Also fascinating to me was the idea of granularity, which refers to whether people view their experiences through a broad and generalized lens of affect or a focused and highly specified lens of emotion. Once again the wide range of ways in which individuals talk about and view their emotions is accounted for by a concept like this, though I was left with some questions about how and why people develop different levels of granularity. The authors make clear that verbal intelligence is not a factor, however they did not provide any other information about variation in granularity, and I was definitely left wanting to know more.

Kaila- Week 4

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

February 10, 2008

In Barrett’s introduction, she comments on an important topic slipping from scientific view as psychology transformed from the science of the mind into the science of behavior: the subjective experience of emotion. LeDoux states that he is not mentioning the subjective feelings of emotion because he believes that “the basic building blocks of emotions are neural systems that mediate behavioral interactions with the environment particularly behaviors that take care of fundamental problems of survival,”(p 125) and the “feelings” can only occur if the organism has the capacity for consciousness. He isn’t willing to say which animals have feelings and which don’t, which is understandable. It may be for this reason that he is focusing on Fear instead of an emotion more like sadness, which seems more subjective. (Just an aside: I really like the way consciousness is compared to digestion and photosynthesis in biological naturalism).

This choice of consistently using Fear as an example makes sense, since it is an emotion exhibited by most animals, and seems evolutionarily sensible, as every organism needs to protect itself long enough to procreate and pass down its genetic information. The physical response from fear is incredibly strong, causing organisms to jump back (like Darwin and the snake) and have an intense “fight or flight” response like the rats LeDoux mentions.

But as I’m reading this, I can’t help but wonder how understanding Fear, as an emotion (without “feeling”), will help us understand other emotions. What about grief? Grief seems to inspire apathy and debilitating distress. When thinking about it in pleasure vs. displeasure terms, or arousal terms, both emotions are unpleasant, yet fear is an active response and sadness makes one desire absolutely nothing. This is only hearsay and I can’t remember the source, but I’ve heard that many times when a baby elephant dies, the mother will stay with it in mourning, many times until she, too, dies, of starvation or some other cause. How can this possibly work with LeDoux’s theory of emotions as an evolutionary response? How can he reconcile it with the idea of emotions being behavioral responses to the environment in a way that “takes care of fundamental problems of survival?” If anything, this sadness took the organism out of the gene pool.

The discussion of consciousness as a biological phenomenon reminded me of a reading we did in my Origins seminar. We learned that some monkeys have a “fear grin,” a facial expression beyond their control when they are experiencing some kind of threat. In Ray Clarke’s class, we discussed a situation in which two monkeys were confronting one another, and one of them was more afraid and couldn’t help but show this grin on his face. He would repeatedly turn around and use his fingers to smooth his lips down and hide the expression, and then turn back around to fight. It seems he was conscious of his expression, and aware that the other chimp would see it and know what it meant.

The capacity to read faces is an incredibly interesting topic to me. The “Naked Faces” article was riveting. I am curious as to why so many people do so poorly on tests that are targeted at recognizing emotion through facial expression (the majority guessing correctly about 50% of the time), while a small minority shows an innate skill for it. What is even more interesting to me is how the skill can be learned. Once shown the “tricks of the trade,” it seems that almost anyone can decipher more information from a face than they’d thought possible.

Another student and I were struck by the idea of using the FACS (Facial Action Coding System) in political situations, like in the courtroom or analyzing the behavior of politicians. We found the anecdote about Bill Clinton’s “hand-in-the-cookie-jar-love-me-Mommy-because-I’m-a-rascal look” particularly amusing. It’s interesting to consider the ethics of people like Ekman pointing out qualities in a person based purely on facial expression. It seems Ekman is convinced that Clinton “needed to get caught,” and did, but how much of this speculation is hindsight and projection, and how much of it can FACS specialists truly predict? For some reason it reminds me of a sort of Minority Report situation. Can you really know if someone is going to do something wrong before they do it? When Harms shot the potentially dangerous man, did he really know that his intention was to turn the inside of the squad car into an inferno? Are people’s future actions demonstrated by their facial expressions? And when we look at those brief flashes of expression that happen so fast they are hardly detectable, how do we approach the censorship of feelings and the difference between emotion and cognition or that false dichotomy?

Communicating with Emotion

Molly McDonough
2.10.08



I want to believe feelings are as simple as John Searle’s explanation of emotional experience. The theory of biological naturalism allows emotions to be explained in an unemotional way. Experiences of emotions are based on first person points of view, so we take what we know of our emotions and explain them the best we can, based on our experience. It’s a natural process, like digestion. Emotions are a tool for communication that can be explained by neuronal activity. We need emotions as a way of communicating our physical state with those around us, allowing basic emotions to be unconscious. All of the readings come together clearly to explain the spectrum of emotional experience. Not the spectrum of different emotions, or basic emotions, but a spectrum for understanding.
In the article, ‘The Structure of Current Affect: Controversies and Emerging Consensus’, Barrett refers to the bipolarity of positive and negative affects. We can’t feel pleasure and displeasure at the same time, just as we can’t be positively and negatively affected when only one emotional experience is taking place. I think this is really interesting, because we can’t explain either pleasure or displeasure without talking about the opposite of the other. This goes back to the first day when we were asked, ‘what is an emotion?’ I couldn’t explain an emotion without making it a metaphor, or explaining what it is not.
I think LeDoux might be exploiting fear by continuing to use it to explain emotions. I really enjoyed this chapter, his most positive writing so far, but I don’t know why he keeps boiling everything down to fear. It’s an unconscious emotion; something that just happens and it’s only after it is passed that we realize we were in ‘fear’, that we were ‘afraid’. I know this is a simplification, but why fear? What am I missing?
LeDoux introduces Plutchik’s 8 Basic Emotions and his theory of basic and derived emotions. I think this really ties into behavior and the struggle that I have with defining emotions separately. The combination of different emotions leads to a certain behavior. LeDoux then moves to describe the way emotions are perceived in other cultures and how emotions can be a state of mind. I would automatically think that an emotional state of mind would have a negative connotation to it, when really it’s learning to be in a ‘certain place’, in a ‘certain frame of mind’ that has to do with the way we display our emotions to eventually deal with them. Sometimes I wish we didn’t have the words to try and express how we feel.
I found ‘The Naked Face’, to be the most enlightening reading we have had on emotions so far. Not only was Gladwell able to summarize what we have been reading and discussing but the concept of reading faces is so interesting! If there is such a science to reading faces, why aren’t more people learning about it? When John Yarbrough doesn’t shoot the kid because he instinctively knows the kid isn’t going to shoot him, at what point are our emotions our own? Why can’t we see someone else reading our emotions and in the flash of doing the opposite, just go right ahead with what we were going to do? This got me thinking about cliff jumping, bungee jumping, sky diving, suicide and situations that we are in complete control of until they take place and all control is lost. Is it doubt, and the feeling of opposition that pushes us over the edge? Is there a greater example of bipolarity; fully controlling something to the point of losing it? Is it possible to be more able to read others emotions than our own? Did Yarbrough know the kid wasn’t going to shoot sooner than the kid knew?

Sorry About First Post!

Tessa Noonan—Feb. 10 (Week 4)

In chapter five of The Emotional Brain, LeDoux again investigates the different components of emotional responses, this time evaluating the genetic or biological aspects of emotions with the primarily psychological elements of consciousness that contribute to emotional being. LeDoux is very straightforward about the prevalence of emotional behavior in animals, as he asserts that all animals display fear reactions, for example. However, he does distinguish between innate biological responses that could be considered “emotional” and what we could deem “feelings,” which are relative to “the capacity to be consciously aware of one’s self and the relation of oneself to the rest of the world” (p. 125). LeDoux’s main point follows Darwin, that animals display very similar responses to stimuli across species, and that their emotions are in fact related to each other evolutionarily. However, in light of cultural variation in emotional display rules, for example, LeDoux acknowledges other cultural determining factors that may adjust the biologically based emotions in order to interact in specific ways.

Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and Gross’s article follows from John Searle’s idea of biological naturalism, which extends conscious states of emotion beyond the neurobiological event of that emotion. This places a greater emphasis on the contextual categorization and appraisal of an emotional event than the pure physical state. They deal with a “core affect,” which seems somewhat akin to LeDoux’s biological emotional core, although that is never explicitly stated. The steps to more complex mental representations of emotions for Barrett et al. rely on surrounding content and contexts in which the emotion and stimulus are based.

I heard about a very interesting study that follows somewhere along these lines, as well as with the Bechara and Naqvi article. In this particular study, a group of researchers went to a high, scary bridge, which is something of a tourist site in Vancouver. The study involved a moderately attractive woman who asked a few questions both to men who were not near the bridge and to men who had just passed over it. The questions themselves were not important in that the study actually documented the man’s reaction to his interviewer: men who had just crossed the fear-inducing bridge found the woman interviewer attractive much more attractive than men who were not near the bridge due to their increased state of physical arousal. When asked about the attractiveness of the interviewer, men frequently attributed this arousal to her rather than to the bridge, demonstrating the easy transference of emotional due to contextual events.

On a separate note, I also found the New Yorker article to be fascinating in its implications. In one of the quotes from Eckman in reviewing tapes of interviews, he says, “He’s not doing it voluntarily,” indicating the elusive and perhaps subconscious nature of our physical emotional reactions. Similarly, he restates a finding he already read about, how creating a facial expression could actually drastically affect the body’s assessment of an emotion and begin to feel that way. This just shows the immense connection between the physical body and the mind in terms of emotions. I wasn’t sure if this position was entirely contradictory to the Barrett et al. article, although there did seem to be some contrasting elements. 

Understanding and Experiencing Emotion